BECHTLER, Cristina; IMHOF, Dora (eds.)
Museum of the Future – Now What?

Rethinking the role of the museum today – a global mapping of museological thinking in our unprecedented times to respond to the need to rethink and reassess the role and place of the museum today.

This collection of interviews and contributions shares idiosyncratic views, feedback, and visions of what is and what should or should not be a museum in the 21stcentury, both inherently and in our fast-changing cultural ecosystem. Do we need a new art historical canon? How can museums become welcoming places for everybody? How should a museum deal with artworks that are considered problematic today? Is the blockbuster a thing of the past? How can museums be sustainable? Where’s the exit? These are some of the pressing questions answered very differently by the contributors, together with others dealing with the relationships between the local and the global, the museums' governance and financial organization, technological possibilities, and audience-related challenges...

Interviewees and contributors include David Adjaye (architect, Accra/London/Los Angeles), Richard Armstrong (Guggenheim Museum, New York), Sylvain Bellenger (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples), Manuel Borja-Villel (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid), Lionel Bovier (MAMCO, Geneva), Raphael Chikukwa (National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare), David Chipperfield (architect, London), Bice Curiger (Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles), Clementine Deliss (Kunstwerke, Berlin), Madeleine Grynsztejn (MCA, Chicago), Sabine Haag (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Camille Henrot (artist, Paris), Jacques Herzog (architect, Basel), Josef Helfenstein (Kunstmuseum, Basel), Junya Ishigami (architect, Tokyo), Sam Keller (Fondation Beyeler, Basel), Ramiro Martínez Estrada (Museo Amparo, Puebla), Sarah Morris (artist, New York), Dimitri Ozerkov (State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg), Adriano Pedrosa (MASP, São Paulo), Susanne Pfeffer (MMK, Frankfurt), Manuel Rabaté (Louvre, Abu Dhabi), Rebecca Rabinow (The Menil Collection, Houston), Pipilotti Rist (artist, Zurich), Adam Szymczyk (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), and Eugene Tan (National Gallery, Singapore).

Published by JRP|Ringier / Les Presses du Réel, 2021
Essays / Conversations / Curatorial Studies